Insecurity and Fragility: The Perpetual Duo of Precarity for ‘Convict Criminologists’ in a Risk Averse Academy

Abstract

Risk management in the criminal justice system reflects a wider societal risk consciousness. People with criminal records are seen as risks requiring governance. Despite the recent interest in embedding lived experience in academic practice, for Convict Criminologists, the collateral and informal pains of imprisonment follow them into university and underpin their precarity, leading to an ingrained ‘Status Fragility’ (Tietjen and Kavish 2021). This article adopts an auto-ethnographic approach, drawing upon two pivotal junctures in the author’s journey, from prison to university and identifying as a Convict Criminologist. It considers how risk aversion and (mis)management are operationalised in a university to extend the experience of punishment after release from prison.